1) I'm not going to produce or raise children with you (childfree, lost 95% of
readers already).
2) You won't be my only partner, any more than I'd want only one
parent or only one sibling: the instinctive need to own a partner
is for joint child raising, and we've already dropped that one
(polyamory, 99%
of readers gone).
3) Our ages might be badly mismatched, which doesn't particularly
matter for people not arranging their life cycles around the next
generation (99.9% gone).
4) Well done, survivors, now look at match scores and read words
below (99.99999% gone).

Other things:
Chapter One - I am born.
I was raised by wolves (well, Welsh people) so never developed the
instincts for dealing with normal people without thinking about it.
Fortunately I've thought about it a lot since then and now have a
thorough understanding of how people behave and why. In theory.
It's unclear whether this does more harm than good.

Chapter Two - what I want and don't want.
I want the same as everyone else: long term relationships with
wonderful intelligent, witty, good women - but several at a time. I
don't want short-term flings because I don't like the breaking up
phase, and I don't want intense LDRs because I don't like the being
separated most of the time. (I have in fact crossed the ocean for a
heart of gold, but found the glister to be a property of email.
Tut.)

The other big thing that explains a lot of my weirdness is my
deep-time perspective, for example:

Where others see a narrow strip of land between hills and the
Scottish coast, I see an ancient beach gouged flat as the glaciers
melted and Britain became an island, then raised up as the slowly
flowing rock recovered from having a mile of ice squashing
it.

Where others see hand gestures as just emphasis, I see the
involuntary muttering of our original language, still latent in the
same brain structures we now use for spoken meaning, and only
allowed to flower when deaf children invent or learn signing as a
native language.

Where others see a wooden table as an inanimate object, I see a
distant relative, made from an unbroken line of cell division back
to the common ancestral soup of plants, fungus and animals.

Interests

Most things in small doses, and a few things in very large doses.
Examples of the latter include:

Human language,
particularly its relationship with our evolution, leading into evolutionary
psychology and paleo-genetics. Those who forget
their biological determinism are doomed to be determined by
it.

Game design,
turn-based internet, not role-playing and not graphical. I
particularly like creating emergent behaviour, where complexity
arises from simple rules: more like an ants' nest or a star than
modern tax rules.

Science
Fiction, mostly about ideas, though I can tolerate human
interest in small amounts.

Financial derivatives, I
like the endless sequence of made-up ways of trading in other
made-up ways of trading. I suspect something so much fun is only
legal because no-one can understand it.

History, mainly
Roman and then extending out in time and space from there, but the
central beauty remains Rome's transition from Republic to Empire:
it's just wonderful.

Primary 1
Met when we were chasing the same girl, married a month later in an
end-of-term prank. Poly from the start in theory, becoming moreso
in practice 15 years in. Unfortunately when the music stopped and
she went monogamous, I didn't get the chair. Now living happily
ever after as a man in Germany.

Primary 2 Pogodragon66
Met via internet when it was proper email with literacy and time to
think, nothing too interactive. Converted her to polyamory, been together for 15
years and very happy. Also known as "wife", in a very
unreconstructed pre-feminist way that's nevertheless quite
endearing.

Jobs
Mostly computer
programming, first for satellite pictures, then financial dealing
systems, then emulation of other computers, then
getting other people to do the actual work. And now moved on to
more useful things.

Odds and Ends

Vegetarian since 1977.
Recently learned to drive cars after 25 years on motorbikes.
Using email since before it was fashionable, when addresses
contained '%' signs to control routing.

I'm quite cathemeral, partly because it's such a good word, but
mainly because it means "the behaviour whereby an organism has
sporadic and random intervals of activity during the day or night
in which food is acquired, socializing with other organisms occurs,
and any other activities necessary for livelihood are
performed."

If you've read this far, or just skipped ahead to see how it ends,
you may also want to look at some of my geekier thoughts, try my
LiveJournal, or more delightfully front-ended with
cat
pictures.

Generally:
Learning and thinking. To get it all done I may need to live
forever, which fortunately is one of my plans, if only I can get
the bugs out of the software in time.

Today: (for some value of today)
The way that, for tidy objects at least, the first derivative of
volume is surface area, as if all matter has been made by endlessly
repainting over bits of grit the size of a point. Like making
pearls, or too much wall-papering.

Threeday:
Whether to write a book for submissives, called "Buy this, and
don't put it down". I think it would sell well and be
unputdownable.

Last time it was today:
Pondering emergent self-awareness in the metazoa. I find it deeply
unintuitive that I feel consciousness that must be distributed over
billions of neurons, as if I were a single entity rather than a
colony of cells stuck together for historical reasons. Zany.

Another day:
Noticing how civilisations from the first water empires to modern
oil powers obsess over the interactions of hydrogen, carbon and
oxygen, just like the cells that make them up. It would be nice to
think our preoccupations derive from the wants of the individual
human brain, but respiration seems to have more to do with it
:-(

Another other day:
Being pleased at how our ears include tiny delicate bones derived
from ancestral reptile jawbones, so we can appreciate music with
what the tyrannosaurus used on its crunchy prey.

Days out of mind:
Being pleased we're descended from lobe-finned fish, rather than
the more common ray-finned sort, so we have nice fleshy arms for
cuddling and soft bottoms for sitting on, rather than nasty spiny
limbs.

I don't like this section: let's change it to If I googled for
your real name, what would I find?

You'd get 2040 hits, of which the highlights are:

Postal games I made up in the 1970s. These are odd not only because
they're online text that pre-dates the internet (originally
published on my hand-cranked Roneo duplicator), but because someone
I've never heard of has a joint credit with me for the top one: who
is this guy?

Modern computer games I invented in the 1990s and left running on
someone else's server, still popular with players long after I've
stopped paying attention. This is how Dr F must have felt.

Games I've played and won, most recently the European Dreamblade
grand tournament. It happens a lot if you like analysis, planning
and talking people into things. The crucial part is not to use my
special powers in real life, as that would be unethical.

My TCP port (and the UDP port that came free with it). I'd like
people to be impressed with this, but realistically I'd settle for
bewildered.

Arguments about the computer languages I've made up, mostly with
people who unaccountably prefer to stick with their old ones.

References to other people with the same name, clearly trying to
make themselves more interesting by pretending to be me. At least
they have the grace to be well down the Google rankings.

And you'd think after 25 years working in the computer industry
there'd be something about that, but no, the cloaking device is
holding up well.

Or for a more exotic but practically truer answer, symbolic
representation in all its levels. From the DNA that allows complex
life by encoding biology as chemistry, through human language that
creates consciousness and self-awareness by encoding meaning into
biology, to computer language that encodes adaptive behaviour into
inanimate objects with numbers, and creates the modern world.

The evolutionary roots of sexual dimorphism in human behaviour, and
how to fix it. For example, I'd guess the men on OKCupid fall into
three groups based on which type of animal provided the genes for
their mating strategy.

The first, and oldest strategy is based on the alpha male instincts
that serve well in most reptiles, small birds and human
hunter-gatherers, who can all raise their young cheaply enough that
they need little more than genes from the father. Males in this
group do best by mating with any available female, so their
emphasis is on impressive tail feathers (peacocks) or showy
property (bower birds) and quantity over quality.

The second strategy better suits emus, giant penguins and early
farmers with the invention of monogamy, for whom raising offspring
is too expensive in time and energy for the mother to succeed
unaided. This is much better for most males than polygamy, since
they do at least get one partner, but it means having to choose
that one very carefully as all the eggs are in one basket. Here the
emphasis is on choosing the best available mate and then ensuring
she doesn't produce any other males' offspring by keeping her
captive.

The third group have no animal role models, having looked at their
own inherited instincts and decided not to follow them. These
people aren't motivated by urges passed on by what worked for fish
and dinosaurs, so could do anything. They might even be nice to
you.

As a child I learned about genetics before sex, which was rather
puzzling, and may have set a pattern. No, that's too geeky, try
again:

I've encouraged people to believe I'm a marine biologist, rather
than admit I'm taking a bucket and spade (but no children) to the
beach to engage in small-scale sand-based civil engineering works.
Actually that's a bit geeky too, one more go:

My secret plan for world domination is going well as no-one yet
suspects anything. Oops, where's the delete button on this
thing?

PS and I include the word "search" here merely to exploit a bug in
the OKCupid search UI.